 If you thought that Lifeline console is just another channel strip, you'd be mistaken. This tool is not only useful but also creative and right now you can get it at a very special price. Hi folks, I'm Mike and I hope you're well. The special deal on it at the moment for Excite Audio's Lifeline console means now is a great time to check it out and see if we can inject some life and character into our mixers. I've been trying it out for the past week or so and this is what I've found. The Lifeline console is a channel strip but it's got some elements to it which make it really different to other channel strips. And despite it's really modern looking interface, it's actually very good for adding some analog or even vintage character to your mixes. And we mainly do that by using these five modules. We have a preamp, an EQ, a compression module, a modulation module and a wear module. Now these last two are really quite different to other channel strips and they've got some really creative elements to them as well. We'll look at those in a little bit more detail later. But before we do get into the detail of each of these modules, I just wanted to take a quick look at this interface as a whole because I think it's not only looking nice but it functions really well as well. Now each of these modules has this sort of simple view that we can see at first with the sort of most useful controls there but they also have an advanced view each. So if we go down to the bottom of this preamp module for example, click on this switch here, we can go to advance view and you can see there's a few more controls here available to us and we can also use this graphic interface interactively so we can start to change values there using our mouse on that graphic interface. Now as well as being sort of expandable with these advanced views, we can also move them around easily and as you would expect you just go to the top of a module here and you just drag it around like so. Now the plugin interface itself remains the same size. It is resizable but it sort of stays the same size even when you open some of these up and open them all up to their advanced mode. Once they're in that sort of mode and they sort of go off of the screen here, if you like, you can just drag from side to side to access them all. So all nice and sort of intuitive in the way it works in this way. Now I also want to mention quickly that each of these modules also works in mid-side mode or left-right mode. You can see the switch for that in the bottom right hand corner of each module so you can switch between the two there. Now you can either have them linked or they can work independently. So I'm in left-right mode at the moment. If I click on this switch, you can see that I can now access the left and the right channel separately. Now you may not have noticed but it also changes the look of these controls up above. So I'll just switch back to the link mode again. Have a look at this mix control here. You can see it's got two rings around the outside. When we have them both linked together, it's just got that one ring indicating the value. When we separate them, then we can see that there's two rings and that's going to show the value of each of those channels separately. And if we hold down control on our keyboard, we can then adjust them both at the same time, although they keep their sort of relationship with each other as you can see. So really nicely thought out interface. I think they've done a really good job of sight audio with this. Now let's take a look at some of these individual modules. Now preamps can be a really good starting point to add character to your sound. And although they may be subtle, they can be a good base to work from. Now the preamp here in Lifeline Console adds saturation and we mainly use this push control at the bottom left here to add that saturation. And as I push it up, if you look at the curve at the top, you can see that it's adding that saturation at the moment, mainly to the higher frequencies. And that's because we have this sector bright up here. Now we actually have three different modes that we can work with. We have bright as you can see here and I can adjust the curve along those higher frequencies mostly. If we change to warm and I adjust it, you'll see it's mainly focusing on the sort of mid frequencies, a little bit biased towards the higher frequencies. And then if we go to the dark mode here and we push that up, we can see that it's mainly focused on those lower frequencies. So let's set it back to zero and go to the bright mode. I'm just going to play a little drum track and we can have a listen to see what it's doing to the sound. Now you probably mostly heard a difference there on this bright mode as I pushed it right up to the top. So let's add a little bit of drive here so we can really hear it a lot more clearly. And then let's switch through the three different modes so you can hear the difference. Now as well as the three different sort of basic modes, we can also make changes, you know, with our mouse up here to these curves that we can also use things like this cue control here, the shape control, et cetera, just to adjust that shape, although it will maintain that sort of emphasis depending on its mode. Now a really cool feature of this is that we do use this push control to add more saturation but we also have this pull control. Now this assists in volume matching as some of you may be aware, sometimes when we're using different plugins and effects, as a byproduct we can increase the sort of volume of everything, it makes things sound better just because they're a little bit louder. We don't really want that, we just want to hear the effect mostly. So what we can do if we use a combination of these push and pull controls is do some volume matching so that we're only hearing the saturation, it's not just sort of getting louder. And you can link those two together. So if you've got your push control all the way down the bottom, you link them as we push, we also are pulling as well. As I say, a good volume matching feature there. Now the EQ probably works exactly as you would expect it to. It's a four band EQ and with each of the four bands we have some controls down below to adjust them. Also in the graphic display we can adjust these with our mouse so we can obviously drag an EQ band up and down to increase or decrease the gain or from left to right to change the frequency. And if we use our scroll wheel then we can adjust the cue as well. Now the difference with this EQ module is that we have three different modes. First of all, we're in the game mode at the moment. That means it's just a clean EQ just functioning purely as an EQ. If we then go to the vintage mode then we add some saturation along the curve. And then when we go to the dirty mode it's a little bit more full on we can really sort of distort things along this curve. So I'm just going to play this track and go through the three modes and let you see if you can hear the difference. Now I will warn you that it is fairly subtle still so I do advise wearing decent headphones or a good pair of studio monitors. But hopefully especially with the dirty mode you'll hear that difference. Even if you were to use it all by itself I reckon the compressor module is really, really handy. Of course it's got the usual controls we'd expect to see with the compressor. It's got threshold, it's got attack, it's got release, it's got ratio and it's got a knee here as well. And when you actually do play your track you can see the compression happening in real time with the display up here. I'll do that now so you can see it happening. So as well as that basic functionality we also have the three different modes that we're used to seeing in other modules here. We've got analog mode, we've got transparent and we've got variable, slightly different algorithms there. And there's some additional controls which I think are really handy that you don't see on all compressors. First of all, I like this frequency cut here. I especially like to cut out some of the lower frequencies when I've got compression on a bus like this because sometimes those low frequency instruments will cause the compressor to kick in when you don't always want it to for the rest of the mix. So handy to be able to adjust that for me. And I really like this makeup feature here. So this is a makeup gain. So for those of you who don't know primarily a compressor is going to reduce the volume. It's going to respond to the signal and reduce the volume. But often we then want to increase it again. So we use makeup gain for that. Now, if I switch this compressor off and have a listen to the track before we did any compression and then switch it on again, you can hear that our track got quieter when I switched it on. So that's why we use makeup gain. But it's not always easy to know how much we should add. So they do have this auto makeup gain feature. So when you play your track you can just press on this A button here and it's going to detect the signal coming in and then adjust this makeup gain automatically to the correct level. So let's do that now. And if you just hold your mouse in as I did then it will just keep analyzing it. So it's more and more accurate. So this way we're able to add the compression but keep, let's do that volume matching again. If you like, we're able to make sure that the signal is still at the same volume when it's coming out. But we may be able to add just a little bit more punch or something like that without actually making it louder. So these three modules that we've just taken a look at are reasonably similar to the kind of modules you may see in other channel strips. But the next two modules really see us take a very creative turn, something which is quite different for a channel strip. Now, before we dive into those and see what they're all about, I just want to quickly remind you that at the moment there is this special on plug-in boutique. If you buy the plug-in that we've been looking at at the moment, which is the full version of Lifeline Console, you get 28% off. Now, for me, that means it's around about $53. It may be slightly different in your part of the world depending on what taxes, et cetera, you incur. You can also get it as a part of a bundle, the Lifeline Bundle, where it comes with Lifeline Expans, 28% off there. And if you really want to save some pennies, you can get 40% off of the light version. For me, it's working up to $31.90. Now, if you click on that, check at the bottom of the page where it shows a comparison chart. I reckon, personally, that if you can afford the extra $20 or so that you should go for the full version. But as I say, if you really want to save the pennies, then have a look at that console light. That's super cheap for a quality plug-in. So in order to demonstrate the modulation, I've got it applied to this fender road sound, which I've got in this track. And we're going to add some wow and flutter using this module. Now, there's three different modes here. We've got tape mode that we're on at the moment. We've got vinyl and then we've got cassette. And these roughly translate to tape being sort of fairly light, vinyl, medium, and cassette heavy. So I'm just going to go to vinyl for a medium effect. I'm also going to change the speed down here from a specific sort of value in hertz to have it synced to the door. So I'll switch that on there to sync to the door. So do that for the flutter. And then I'm just going to adjust that. I'll put it to roughly where I think it's going to be for each of those. Let's do different on each of those. And then we're going to use our depth controls to actually add in the effect. So let's do that with wow, first of all. So you can hear that's changing the pitch of that there as we're going along. It's fairly extreme at the moment. I'm just doing extreme so you can hear it clearly. Let's do some flutter as well. Now, as well as having those major controls, we also have some different sort of shapes there for the modulation. You can see the different shapes there. I'll leave them on the default ones at the moment. And then I'm also just going to use this mix control sort of to blend the original in with this more sort of extreme setting that I've got here just to make it sound a little bit more natural. Okay, and let's hear that in the context of the track. I rather like that. It's got a kind of a spooky vibe to it. So as its name suggests, the wear module adds the sound of wear and tear to your production. And it's got three different modes. We've got tape, we've got vinyl, and we've got cassette. Now, if we go back to the tape mode here, I'm going to add in some amp noise here using this slider here. So have a listen for that. And if you listen carefully, as I go between the three different modes, you'll hear the sound of this amp noise change its character. Okay, let's have a listen. So we've got those three different modes. The character changes with these sounds. And we don't just have the amp noise. We also have some hum. We have mechanical noises. And then we have dust as well. And we can blend all of those four together to sort of craft our own specific noise. And then we can adjust the overall volume of that with this noise knob over here, okay? Now, we're in constant mode at the moment. You can see that down the bottom where it says constant, which means that that noise is going to be going all the time regardless of what's happening with the music. We'll have a listen to that. But we also have some other modes here. So for example, we can go to duct mode. Now, this works a little bit like sidechain compression in that it's going to suppress the sound of this noise once that music comes in, okay? So I'm just going to adjust the sustain down here so we can hear this a bit more clearly. I'll turn the noise up. And we can hear the noise, but listen to what happens when I play the music. Now, as with all of these controls, I'm using them in a reasonably sort of extreme way so you can hear what's going on. You'd probably use it a little bit more subtly like that, but useful for keeping that noise out of the way of the music when you want to. Now, we have another two modes which are really interesting. Again, I'm just going to adjust this sustain control here and go over to dynamic mode. Now, this is almost the opposite of ducking. So rather than moving the noise out of the way, it's going to increase the noise level when the music plays, okay? So at the moment in actual fact, you can't hear it, but when I play the music, that noise is going to come in. So you can actually use this really creatively at times and even more sort of useful creatively, I reckon is the trigger mode over here. This is a little bit like dynamic, except we're never going to hear the original music. We're only going to hear the noise coming in, but it's going to be triggered by the music. So let's have a listen to that. So some really interesting modes there. As I say, I reckon you could use those really, really creatively. The other tab that we have in this module is the age tab. Let's go over to that. And we have two different things that we can add in here. There's artifacts on the left and then there's dropouts on the right. Both of these get added with these gain controls that you can see here. And we can also control their speed either specifically down here with the speed control, or we can sync them to our door, a bit like some of our other modules there. So I'll sync both of these and I'll start off by adding in some artifacts. I'll push the gain up here, add the age up here and let's play our music. You can hear those sort of little crackles there. Now let's do the same with dropouts. So again, there's sort of fairly extreme examples there. You probably may want to use them more subtly in your productions, but a really interesting approach to this. I've seen a number of different plugins which have these sort of wear and tear type sounds. I haven't seen anything that does it in quite this way where you can get really, really creative with the way that you add these effects. Now as well as those modules, we also have some controls on the right hand side over here. We have this triangle control here so we can go between the driest signal, a clean sound and a vintage sound. We also have this warm control here which sort of enhances the low frequencies and shine which enhances some of the high frequencies. So I'm just gonna play the track here. I'm gonna play with all of these three controls just to get it where I want it. I really love the effort that's gone into the design of this plugin from Excite Audio and it's amazing that you can get it at the price you can at the moment from Plugin Boutique. Don't forget to check the link in the description down below. Now during my demos in this video, I was using a Fender Rhodes sound. Now that was a part of the V Collection, V Collection 9 from Arturia. I reviewed that recently and you can check out my video for that right here. Go on, go ahead, grab yourself a coffee and binge.